by Vivi Anna
After taking out the elastic from my hair, I settled my helmet over my head. Before mounting the bike, I thought about the poor woman that had been savaged by something. I wasn’t yet prepared to say it had been a werewolf attack, but I definitely was leaning that way.
I didn’t want werewolves to be the big bad creatures depicted in bad horror films. Because if they turned out to be monsters, then I was sure I wasn’t that far behind them.
My thoughts strayed to Officer Stettler’s claim that I had the hots for one of them. Severin Saint Morgan in particular.
Emigrated from Australia years ago, Severin appeared to be a mild-mannered associate professor at the University of British Columbia. He was the poster boy so to speak for the werewolf community. He’d been on TV several times talking about how werewolf packs operated, trying I was sure to calm the public. I had to admit they chose him well. How could anyone think werewolves were monsters when one of their own was packaged so well?
Swinging my leg over the bike, I nestled into the leather seat, and kicked the bike over. But I didn’t pull away from the curb. The hair on the back of my neck prickled. I felt uneasy, almost like I was being watched.
I was pretty much alone on the street except for a couple of homeless people, both of whom I knew by name. I glanced across the street to see if someone lurked in the doorways or first floor windows of the pawn shop. As far as I could see, there was no one there.
I wasn’t usually paranoid but the feeling would not vanish. I shivered inside my jacket but not from the cool night air.
Resigned to just move on, I turned back around, but that was when something on the rooftop of the building opposite me caught my eye. Startled, I stared up at the top of the brick building. There were dark shadows, but some of them seemed to be moving. Then a black shape sprang from one rooftop to the next.
I shook my head, thinking my eyes were playing tricks. No way could a person could jump that far. But maybe it wasn’t exactly a person up there lurking in the night. Maybe it was something else. Something not quite human.
Shivering again, I kicked up the stand and decided to get the hell out of there. Quickly. I pulled away from the curb, intending to race away from the ominous feeling that had taken hold.
Because of the late hour, I decided to take a short cut home. The roads I chose weren’t in the best areas of town but I didn’t have any fear. It took a lot more than a few homeless people and young gang members shooting off their mouths to frighten me. When I was on my bike, especially at night, I felt completely untouchable.
I raced through the Eastside. As I made the next turn, I might have been over the speed limit. That could’ve been why I had trouble stopping as I came upon a giant brown wolf standing in the middle of the street.
Chapter Two
After sliding with the bike for about twelve feet, I came to a complete stop. The wolf seemed to watch me struggle underneath the weight of the bike then bounded off into the shadows. Thankfully, I wasn’t injured. My knee-high riding boots protected my lower leg from road-rash.
Once I righted the bike and kicked the stand, I tore off my helmet, hung it on the handlebar, and walked down the street, searching the shadows for the wolf. As I was sure it had been one. Which meant a werewolf was nearby.
As I stood there, out in the open and vulnerable, I thought maybe this wasn’t the smartest thing to do. I should get back on my bike and get the hell out of there.
Sure, I had training in defensive techniques—I studied S.I.N.G. like everyone else (solar plexus, instep, nose, groin)—and some martial arts, but not enough to take on a huge wolf that could rip out my throat with one swipe of its lethal claws.
I started to back up towards my bike. Maybe I could get on it and start it before something big and hairy and hungry leapt out at me from the shadows. If I ran, I wondered if it would chase me.
“Are you injured?”
The sexy accented voice came from a line of shadows near one of the old buildings. Turning, I searched the night for him. I could see a form moving in the shadows. Then he stepped out into the glow of the street lamps and I nearly lost all reason.
Unabashedly naked, he strode into the street toward me. His skin shone with sweat and I admit fully to ogling him from head to toe. Possibly pausing much too long on the middle part to be considered polite. But by the enticing grin on his face, he didn’t seem to mind in the least.
“No,” I finally managed to say.
As he neared, I realized he was maybe only an inch taller than my five foot ten inches. But he was wide, like a linebacker on a football team. Powerful shoulders, muscular arms, flat stomach, and ripped athletic legs, he was incredible to look at. I tried not to stare too long at his other attributes, but it was impossible not to.
Severin Saint Morgan was a big man.
Clearing my throat, I finally found my voice, although it was a bit shaky. “What were you doing in the middle of the road?”
“Prowling.” His wet hair fell forward. He ran his hands through the lustrous brown waves, pulling them back off his face. His light blue eyes seemed to dance in his angular face. They were striking, intense. And they hadn’t left my face since he stepped out of the shadows.
“Well next time, maybe you should stick to the sidewalks.” I was wringing my hands together when I noticed that my skin was unnaturally white. They almost seemed to glow a little. I quickly hid them behind my back.
He grinned at that.
I felt something warm begin to flow inside. Heat swirled in my stomach and threatened to venture lower if I didn’t put a cork in my carnal thoughts. This was extremely difficult with an incredibly alluring naked man standing in front of me smiling.
“You have a beautiful smile.”
My heart picked up a few extra beats. “Thank you.” God, I was scared out of my mind, but at the same time desire flared over me. A strange combination.
He nodded. “You’re a nurse.”
His words weren’t a question.
“Yes,” I said, my voice cracking. “How do you know that?” And my thoughts flitted back to the moving shadows on the rooftop by the hospital.
He gestured with his hand. “Your scrubs.”
I glanced down at myself. I had on my light blue hospital scrubs still. They were pretty distinctive. “Oh, right. Yes, I work at St. Paul’s.”
“It suits you. You give off this healing vibe.” He continued to stare into my eyes.
I should’ve felt unnerved but I didn’t. I liked his intensity. Which was strange because I usually didn’t like people looking at me for so long. Hiding was harder when someone’s trying to stare right through you.
I stared back at him, letting my gaze drift slowly down his body. That was when I noticed the long red gouges on his chest.
“You’re hurt.” I had the sudden urge to reach out and touch him, to soothe the angry looking cuts. I wondered where he’d gotten them. During his prowling about town?
“Just a scratch. It’ll be gone in a couple of days.” He touched the swelling marks, pushing on them as if to prove his point. “We have remarkable healing capabilities.”
“Yes, I know. I saw you on Breakfast Television talking about some of your…ah, differences.”
He just continued to eye me, as if in consideration of something, making me nervous and fluttery in odd places. By the flash in his eyes, he knew what he was doing to me.
“What were you doing in this neighborhood? Not a likely place a university professor would hang out,” I asked, still curious about his injury.
“I had business nearby.”
I eyed him, not quite sure what to make of him. I wasn’t one hundred percent positive that he wasn’t a danger to me in some way. Because he was dangerous. No doubt about it.
“You weren’t over at St. Paul’s earlier, were you?”
A few seconds passed before he answered. “Why would you ask?”
“Because a woman came in with a gut wound and marks just like t
hose.” I gestured to his chest. “She died on the table before we could stitch her back together.”
“That’s unfortunate. I’m sorry to hear that she died.”
“You followed me, didn’t you? From St. Paul’s? I saw you on the rooftops.”
He nodded. “I heard about the attack and I had to follow up on it. My job is to keep the werewolf community in check.”
I shivered again from his intensity. This man had a lot of power, it radiated from him. I sensed that if he knew who’d been responsible for the attack on that woman, he’d take care of it. With his own type of justice I suspected. It made me curious how werewolves punished their own.
“How did you know that I was even involved? We get tons of trauma patients in every night.”
He tapped his nose. “I could smell the attack on you.”
I had no idea what to say to that.
After a few more moments of staring at one another, he bowed to me. Which I found extremely odd but pleasant. “I must take my leave but first if you would grant me your name.”
“It’s Nina Decker.”
“Nina.”
The way he said my name made me think of someone sampling a delicacy and finding it extremely pleasant. My belly and lower clenched in response.
“Stay safe.” With a last nod, he turned and walked back across the street toward the shadows along one old building.
I had to admit I watched every swagger of his tight ass.
Glancing over his shoulder, he said, “I hope to see you again, but this time under different circumstances.”
Speechless, I remained glued to the spot and watched as he disappeared into the night. I don’t know how long I stood there, but by the time I turned and got back on my bike, my legs were sore from standing in one spot on the pavement for too long.
Chapter Three
On the drive home, I thought about Severin. It was difficult not to—the man was unforgettable. And I had to admit I knew more about him than probably was normal…or safe. I’d spent a good two hours Googling him after the first time I’d seen him on TV. For curiosity sake, of course.
I managed to find an article he’d written for the Scientific Journal about the evolution of wolves. He’d discovered a recessive gene in one of the species—a gene closely related to humans. In response came a few articles debunking his theories and work. I kept those too.
The man was a triple threat—intelligent, ambitious and devastatingly gorgeous. And probably not someone I should be thinking, or daydreaming, about. Or anything else of the kind. He was of a different species. One I knew nothing about. It was one thing to get into a relationship with a man you didn’t know, but with a werewolf…
Who knew what came with that.
And speaking of alternate species, I thought about how my hands had seemed to glow earlier in the lamp light. I glanced in my side mirror at my face. Moving right and left, I examined the skin. It didn’t appear as if I was glowing. I was certainly pale, like fine-boned porcelain, someone had once told me, and add the fact that my hair was as black as ink. Despite that I didn’t think I was actually glowing. At least, I hope I wasn’t. Now that we were a brave new paranormal world, something that bizarre would make someone want to do tests on me. If werewolves existed, what other legends were true? I had no doubt plenty of people wanted to find that out. I was not prepared for that to happen. Ever.
A half hour later, after parking my bike in my garage at home, I flipped on the light in my kitchen, tossing keys and my canvas bag onto the granite counter. In the sink were a dirty plate and a pot half-submersed in greasy water. Shaking my head, I pulled them out, rinsed them off and put them in the dishwasher.
I hadn’t even closed the dishwasher door when the sound of footsteps brought my head around.
“Kinda late to be coming home, don’t you think?”
Instantly, I relaxed. “I had a twelve-hour shift.” I finished closing the door, latched it and turned the knob. “Would you like some tea?” I opened the cupboard and took out two tea cups knowing he would say yes.
Nodding, he pulled out one of the kitchen chairs and lowered his frail frame into it.
As I filled the teapot with water and set it on the stove, I looked at him, my heart breaking every time.
He was tall and gangly, all long thin limbs with no substance. I remembered a time when he wasn’t like that. He’d been strapping and handsome, full of vigor, up for anything at any time. We had some good times together, laughing, and playing. Jason Decker, my father, had always been one for games.
Now he was old and withered, looking and feeling ancient beyond his sixty-two years. And there was nothing I could do but watch him slowly fade. My mother was to blame. She’d sucked the life and joy out of him, and left without a second thought to his welfare. She cared only for herself and her own selfish pleasure.
“What did you do tonight, Da?” I asked as I put chamomile tea bags into our cups.
“Sat by the garden.”
He did that just about every day. All his days consisted of now were napping, sitting in the garden, and painting. He had a little studio off the living room where he spent hours creating portraits of my mother. Whether he used charcoal, oil-based paint, or watercolor, every single painting was of her in some form.
Some paintings were lovely, with exquisite attention to detail and eye-appealing color, and some were so dark, so violent and twisted, I even had trouble looking at them. And I knew that was what his soul looked like, a mixture of beauty and darkness, twisted together. Light and dark in conflict. Always in conflict.
That was what being fae-struck did to a person. Made them fractured, disjointed, with a mind barely able to hold onto reality. And an aging withered body to match.
That was my legacy, my secret and my curse. My mother was from the realm of the dark fae, a place steeped in darkness and mystery. I was born to it, but would never see it. Never wanted to either.
The fae were an ancient race of people cloaked in magic and mayhem. Some had even been worshipped as gods and goddesses during the time of the Celtic people. Fairy tales had been invented to describe them, but in reality, there was nothing whimsical about them. They were a dark and dangerous species that I had worked all my life to forget existed.
Fae blood may have flowed through my veins, but I was human—mind, body and soul.
The teapot whistled and I poured the hot water into our cups, taking them both to the table. I set his in front of him with a spoon. “I hope you wore a sweater. The air was a little cool earlier.”
“I saw some pixies playing in the lavender.”
I dunked the teabag up and down in my cup, trying not to look into his expectant face, set it on a napkin on the table, then picked up my spoon to stir. “Da, I told you to ignore them.”
He banged his fist on the table, rattling his spoon. “I don’t want to ignore them, Nina. I like to watch them. One even talked to me for a spell.”
I rubbed at my forehead where a headache was starting to take hold. I really didn’t want to have another conversation like this, not at one in the morning. “Why don’t you take your tea to bed with you? You should get some sleep.”
“Don’t treat me like a child, A’lona.”
Sighing, I reached across the table and squeezed his withered hand. “I’m not her, Da. I’m not A’lona. I’m your daughter, Nina, remember?”
At first, his eyes were clouded over when he looked at me, but after a turn, they seemed to clear and he smiled as if truly seeing me for the first time.
I returned his smile, overjoyed that he was lucid. He had days where he had no idea where he was. It wasn’t Alzheimer’s. We’d had all the tests. I knew what it was but he didn’t want to admit the truth. He didn’t want to accept that my mother had done this to him.
“I know who you are, my darling.” He squeezed my hand tight. “You just look so much like her, so much like your mother.”
I know he was paying me a compliment. My mother,
A’lona, had been breathtakingly beautiful with lustrous dark hair, spring green eyes, and luminous pale flawless complexion. But because of my anger toward her, I hated being compared to her in any way. I hoped and I prayed that I wasn’t anything like her and would never be, no matter what life threw at me.
“Yeah, well, unfortunately I can’t seem to help that. Genetics and all.” I gave him a quick sardonic smile and sipped my tea.
“One day you’ll have to forgive her.”
“Why?”
Picking up his cup, he sat back in his chair and regarded me. “Because some day you may need her.”
“I can’t see that day ever coming, Da. Not when I have you.”
He sipped his drink then set it down on the table. “I won’t always be here, Nina. You know that. Your mother will be around a lot longer.”
“Yeah, well, that can’t be helped either.” Standing, I took my tea to the sink and dumped it. I was no longer in the mood for a nice cup of soothing tea. Talking about my mother had that affect. Anything that comforting or joyful faded when I thought about her.
She had abandoned me when I was ten and I had yet to forgive her. Nor did I see that ever happening. In the past seventeen years, I’d seen her only twice—both times on my birthday, once when I was turning sixteen and the other time when I was turning twenty-one. She’d arrived unexpectedly on the doorstep, bearing gifts for both Da and I. As if expensive presents could make up for her abandonment.
For my sweet sixteenth, she gave me a glass globe. Inside was a tiny village made out of porcelain nestled in a wooded glen beside a tall mountain. When you shook the globe, tiny glowing stars would dance around. Quite beautiful. She told me it was the realm of Nightfall where she had been born, the place she had left us for. Every time I shook it, she said, she would know that I was thinking of her.